Thursday, April 14, 2016

Final Reflections Carli Stone

My self-directed learning

Growing up
(3rd grade until I graduated from high school) I was
homeschooled.Because of this experience
I was given many opportunities to self teach, and chose what I wanted to
study.This class was a great reminder
of how satisfying it is to choose what you want to learn, and read and educated
yourself more on topics that interest you.One of the things that I did almost every day at the beginning of the
semester was watch history videos on YouTube.I did not expect this to be as beneficial as it was, but I learned so
much from each video that I watched.I
continued to study and watch videos as I feel like I was able to learn so much
from each of them.One specific video
that I watched one day focused on way the industrial revolution took place in
Europe instead of China.This was one of
the most interesting videos that I watched this semester, and one of the most
educational.Another day as we were
studying about the 20th century I felt a little bit
overwhelmed.I went online and searched
for some of the more substantial events of the 20th century, and
ended up reading an article that went through each decade and broke it down
with events and occurrences in that time period and how it effected the rest of
the world.

My evolving project

As we
started our project my idea of what I wanted to study and focus on was
extremely broad.I wanted to focus a lot
of my project on sprezzatura.Unfortunately, sprezzatura is a very confusing topic if you do not have
a background understanding it from a historical stance tying it into modern day
is tough to understand.The start of
group project was a focus on connection and collaboration.After a few times meetings and getting
started on the video part of our project we started to realize that our topics
were not similar enough.Even after our
first time collaborating as a group Jordan pointed out to me that more
specifically, my topic did not fit well with that of the rest of group.Dr. Burton also mentioned to me that sprezzatura
was not being explained in a very good way.One day Bryce, Rachelle and I met as a cohort with Dr. Burton to discuss
our topics and make a video.It didn’t
take long for us to realize that our topics were too different to bring
together in a smooth and easy way.After
much talk, and interest in an opposing view of the digital age by Laycee, we
decided that we would focus our project on the positive effects of technology
and more especially social media.

Communication and History

We see the effects of communication in history
all the time.If we think of the
Renaissance we can see people learning to express themselves and communicate in
a new and unique way.In the reformation
we see the way that Martin Luther for example communicated himself to the
Catholic Church. (Not the most effective way to communicate, but communication
nonetheless).Even more than throughout
history, we can see how communication has changed throughout time.I think the biggest take away from this class
is being able to understand HOW the past affects us today.As I have studied more about history and the
past (and enjoyed it), I’m more excited to draw connections from the past to
our present day.They way that we
communicate today has a great deal to do with technological advances from the
past.Not to use him again, but I look
at the example of Martin Luther.He,
like many of today had an easier time communicating through written word rather
than spoken word.How often do we text
someone, or email someone something that is more harsh than perhaps we would be
able to muster up the courage to say to their face.Many of the means of communication from the
past affects us today.In one of my
posts on digital dialog I talked about the moving forward of experiments and why I felt they were changing and improving rapidly, and in a positive
way.I think just as we see this with
experiments the same goes for technology, and communication.